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Hubble Surveys Cloudy Cluster

Hubble Surveys Cloudy Cluster

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Hubble Surveys Cloudy Cluster

Stars in a star cluster shine brightly blue, with four-pointed diffraction spikes radiating from them. The center shows a small, crowded group of stars while a larger group is partially visible on the right side of the image. The nebula is mostly thick, smoky clouds of gas, lit up in blue tones by the stars. Clumps of dust hover before and around the stars; they are mostly dark but lit around their edges where the starlight erodes them.

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the nebula LMC N44C.

ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a cloudy starscape from an impressive star cluster. This scene is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy situated about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. With a mass equal to 10–20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the dozens of small galaxies that orbit our galaxy.

The Large Magellanic Cloud is home to several massive stellar nurseries where gas clouds, like those strewn across this image, coalesce into new stars. Today’s image depicts a portion of the galaxy’s second-largest star-forming region, which is called N11. (The most massive and prolific star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula, is a frequent target for Hubble.) We see bright, young stars lighting up the gas clouds and sculpting clumps of dust with powerful ultraviolet radiation.

This image marries observations made roughly 20 years apart, a testament to Hubble’s longevity. The first set of observations, which were carried out in 2002–2003, capitalized on the exquisite sensitivity and resolution of the then-newly-installed Advanced Camera for Surveys. Astronomers turned Hubble toward the N11 star cluster to do something that had never been done before at the time: catalog all the stars in a young cluster with masses between 10% of the Sun’s mass and 100 times the Sun’s mass.

The second set of observations came from Hubble’s newest camera, the Wide Field Camera 3. These images focused on the dusty clouds that permeate the cluster, providing us with a new perspective on cosmic dust.